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Windows 7 Multitouch Demonstration
Starturtle writes "Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have shown a small snippet of the upcoming Windows 7 at Walt Mossberg's D: All Things Digital conference. It seems like the Windows team have switched their focus for inspiration from Mac OS X to the iPhone OS. Multitouch is the biggest addition, and will appear system-wide, usable anywhere. The most interesting part of the touch UI is not the eye candy, it's the Task Bar, which seems to have morphed into a pie menu."
Why 2 articles so close about what WON'T be in Windows 7 and now what WILL be in Windows 7... ? Maybe I'm not seeing the forest for the trees but what kind of marketing tactics are these?
For instance in the movie industry... in a highly anticipated movie, let's say a book-to-movie one, you never hear about what they've LEFT OUT until the reviews start pouring in. OTOH, we hear "all about the great scene from the book that's also in the movie"... well before the reviews in the previews or buzz...
Or with Apple announcements we hear at best rumors about what will & won't be in it...
and then we hear from Microsoft a while back (forgive me for not recalling the article) that there won't be much external buzz about the contents of Windows 7 & that development will be much more "sealed" or "internal" for lack of better words...
so why the change of heart? Why are we hearing so much about what will & won't be there? There has to be more reason to this than to just generate some sort of overall interest via marketing in this respect, and I'm wondering beyond the typical answer "...because their last OS sucked ass" mainly because that answer doesn't really answer anything... any more insightful ideas?
Given that apple probably spent 2 years working on their own touch system for the iPhone before it was even announced you might want to check your dates.
Besides touch tech has been going back to the 1980's it just is starting to become practical. personally there are a lot of interfaces that are perfect for touch input methods.
Telemarketing call centers, restaurants are already using it, retail POS, kiosks, etc.
multi-point touch is going to be a key third input method. the mouse and keyboard are the first two.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I notice that this machine redraws on zooms quickly, and creates a travel route quickly. That means the box has some real horsepower.
And yet, the dragging is way behind the finger, the responses of input and menu popup is slow -- it looks like running a modern paint program on an old machine.
This is not going to make for a pleasant user experience. Why is that stuff so uncrisp?
I would touch a 24" monitor that was designed to be touched, like an iphone. My iphone gets smudged and such but I almost never notice it at normal viewing angles.
Fact is most UIs are lousy. I don't think adding multi touch really qualifies as an improvement on its own, more like an improvement to input devices, but if it happens to carry along smarter use of screen space and improved ability to size on screen objects to optimum, etc etc, I'm all for it. I'd like to see some work go into something other than decoration.
I just don't see screen smudging being a deal breaker unless you're the type who eats a lot of gravy with your hands.
iPhone did the second-best thing. The screen is really easy to wipe clean--it doesn't seem to retain even the most greasy fingerprints.
It seems to be hard as nails as well. Is it actual glass?
The only thing I'm dreading is the day a grain of sand gets into my cleaning cloth--I do wipe pretty hard.
Also, what's with those cloths that Apple puts into the notebook/iPhones? Those things are absolutely perfect. I've never seen a better "Wiping Cloth". Use it all the time for my glasses, screens and phone. I think it's some kind of a fine-mesh, soft felt.
Since I got those, seriously, I have had no need to use liquid glass cleaner on my iphone, glasses or LCD screens. I did breathe on my iPhone once to get a drop of something off.
It looks neat but I wonder how practical is a multi-touch screen unless you can fully replace either a keyboard or mouse with it. We've all seen the applications of touch interfaces in movies. But in those cases, they could have used a mouse and keyboard. It wasn't vital that it had to be touch technology.
In applications were touch is essential, they are most often very specialized. If you look at the touch-screen applications today, they are for areas where a keyboard and mouse are not practical and often the interfaces are simplified to allow fewer choices. For example in restaurants, waiter use them as registers. Everything is usually driven by a limited number of screen buttons that they can push. For the iPhone, the screen is customized around specific functions like making calls, etc. You could use them to write term papers, but it wouldn't be very practical.
It would seem that adding multi-touch to a screen was be extraneous. Sure you could do a few things , but it would be another input device that you have to manage. These days, people have to break work flow when they switch between a keyboard and a mouse by going sideways. If you'd replace the mouse with the screen, you'd have to move forward and possibly shift your body. I just don't see that as practical.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
would take this stuff seriously? The problem is most will.
./ can be laughed at for calling some dev groups blood, sweat and tears, and management's gravy train broken.
1. Sure microsoft delivers above-average returns and that's enough reason for hanging onto it. But stock prices have some -future prospects- built into it. I see none at Microsoft. Zero. Especially when they flush dev resources down the drain for their forthcoming knock-off iPhones that probably won't see the light of day for a decade.
Off-topic
My gut feeling is, there's a growing reality distortion field that most of the people/groups managing funds are working in. If I had to guess, I'd say their math/quant models are wrong because these are a relatively new set of economic conditions. News disguised as PR fills this gap nicely and brings some sense of equilibrium back.
Meanwhile some hack on
Flame on!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
It saddens me that Microsoft is using the pie menu before open source did it. The pie menu is something I've been after for years. Perhaps we'll see it in Gnome or (preferably IMO) KDE before Windows 7 is ever released?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Thank you. Nice to see someone who actually understands how the Microsoft ruse works.
I would hope so about it being vaporware. I am not amazed or amused by this video. I never had a problem using a mouse to zoom in. Especially one with a wheel on it. Why not focus on making a real OS instead of working on a replacement for the magnifying glass cursor. just my opinion.
The real problem here is that Microsoft is just regurgitating what we saw from Jeff Han two years ago.
Draggable freely-resizeable photo viewer? Amazing, MS, welcome to 2006! Pinch-zoom map viewer? Again, good to see you MS engineers watched Han's TED presentation on Youtube; I liked it too!
So they can integrate a (laggy) version of the tech into the OS. Step 1, done.
Now, how about some actual design? Copying two-year-old TED videos doesn't count; let's see some insight into how this tech can be used to make managing files easier, make navigating data relationships easier, and so on. Seriously, fire half your UI "design" team and replace them with the folks who built Photosynth; maybe bring in some of the Zune embedded UI team too; they might figure out how to actually make a decent multi-touch UI for Windows 7.
Or will Ballmer be content to just have "OH LOOK PHOTO SORTING" on top of a slightly less stable and slightly more DRMed future Windows release?
If history is anything to go by...
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
This is getting pretty pathetic. I am even willing to give XP some credit for being a decent OS, even more so now compared to Vista. (Maybe that is the secret plan, release Vista, demo Windows 7, and then triple the cost of XP since it is "out of support"). But seriously, Vista Aero (Sounds alot like Aqua), then we have the Sideboard vs Dashboard, now multitouch. MS is clearly clueless to what is really happening. They apparently think it is the eye candy wizbang stuff from Apple that makes it attractive. So (true to their origins) they copy Apple innovations and find a stunning way to make them completely useless or unusable.
MS is losing huge ground when it comes to "just works". The non computer savvy have come to accept that computers crash, behave erratically, or otherwise do flakey things on a whim due to the tremendous amount of glitchy nonsense that MS foists upon the user. OS X and even Linux are gaining some pretty significant traction while MS fuddles around in circles forcing upgrades into more garbage the user doesn't really want or need.
Though I suppose the other secret plan could be that fact that this type of feature crap continues to bloat the OS at an alarming rate requiring much faster and newer hardware just to make your computer usable. I think they are setting up to recieve kickbacks from hardware vendors on sales to make up for their other failures.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
It's funny, before I bought an iPod Touch I made sure I went and played with one because every other touch interface I've ever used has had lag and sensitivity problems. The iPod handles pretty much everything really well. So why the lag in that demo?
Multi-touch technology dates back to 1982, when the University of Toronto developed the first finger pressure multi-touch display. The same year, Bell Labs and Murray Hill published what is believed to be the first paper discussing touch-screen based interfaces. In 1984 Bell Labs engineered a touch screen that could manipulate images. The same year Microsoft began research in the area. A significant breakthrough occurred in 1991, when Pierre Wellner published a paper on his multi-touch "Digital Desk", which supported multi-finger and pinching motions (these would later be critical to the development of modern products such as the iPhone). In 1998, Fingerworks, a Newark-based company run by University of Delaware academics John Elias and Wayne Westerman, produced a line of multi-touch products including the iGesture Pad
Jim
Yeah, I agree. I think a mouse is faster and more accurate anyway. It has the "cool factor" but it's not really that practical. Plus my puny geek arms would get sore holding them up all day ;)